It started with a bolt of lightning and a clap of thunder so loud that I jumped out of my seat. I was sitting at my desk on the Friday before Easter, wrapping up MacStories Weekly on my Mac Studio during a thunderstorm, when the lightning struck. Other than startling me, though, everything seemed fine....
MacStories Unwind+, AV Club, and Journaling Rumors
Here are the highlights from the Club MacStories Discord this week:
MacStories Unwind+ debuted for Club members this week, which touched off a fun discussion of weird potato chip flavors. Speaking of Unwind, Jonathan Reed kicked off picks for the May edition of AV Club, which will be recorded live in Discord and released...
Pruning Your AirDrop Device List
Sometimes you make an adjustment to your setup that seems so obvious that you wonder why you didn’t do it earlier. This is one of those. I probably should write about them more often because as obvious as it seemed to me in hindsight, the fact is that it took me a while to do...
Raindrop.io
I switch link organizers like Federico switches task managers, which is to say, a lot. It’s a category I love to test because it’s so hard to pin down. Some apps handle nothing but URLs. Other apps double as read-later apps. Still others focus on creating archival copies of webpages. Overlay the myriad reasons people...
App Debuts
Surfed Surfed, one of this week’s giveaways in our Discord community, has evolved a lot since it was first released. The app tracks your browsing history with your permission, which allows you to easily revisit sites and view statistics about your web browsing, but it also serves as a bookmarking service. Sites you’ve visited...
Interesting Links
Sean Hollister of The Verge x-rayed a bunch of tech gadgets and the images are fascinating. (Link) ASUS took the wraps off the ROG Ally this week, a powerful handheld gaming PC featuring a Ryzen Z1 APU and 7-inch 120Hz display. (Link) The Dyson Zone is a $949 air purifier combined with noise cancelling...
MacStories Unwind: Introducing the New Unwind and Unwind+
Welcome to the all-new MacStories Unwind+, a weekly extension of MacStories Unwind just for Club MacStories members that is ad-free, and delivered early each week in high-bitrate audio.
This week, Federico explains Unwind’s new format, and John introduces him to ‘The Crab Chip’ before moving on to this week’s picks, which include an update from Federico on How I Met Your Father and Pokémon Scarlet and from John, an un-pick, an electric grill, and The Last Thing He Told Me.
Links and Show Notes
Introducing the New Unwind and Unwind+
The Crab Chip
The Picks
- Federico’s Pick Update:
- How I Met Your Father, Season 2
- Pokémon Scarlet
- John’s Un-Pick
- John’s Picks
TestFlight’s Inability to Handle Large Beta Collections Needs to Be Fixed
I’ve been thinking about app scalability a lot lately – most recently in the context of TestFlight, which I find is incredibly frustrating to use, at best, and, on the Mac, often unusable. This isn’t a new problem for me, but I haven’t mentioned it much in the past because I’ve suspected that my experience is colored by the fact that I’m an outlier. But, outlier or not, the app deserves more attention than it’s been given.
MacStories Unwind Expands to Club MacStories with Unwind+
MacStories Unwind began as an experiment that sprung from the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. It started as a recap of the week at MacStories paired with a couple of quick media picks for listeners who were stuck at home. Early last year, we refocused the show on the media picks, which has proven popular with listeners, so today, we’re pleased to announce an expansion of the show for both existing listeners and Club MacStories members.
If you’re already a listener, Unwind will continue to feature weekly media picks and be about a half-hour long. What we’re adding is a little more conversation and personality, which has been missing from the show. As is the case now, Unwind will also remain free to download on Fridays and be supported by ads and promotions for other things we’re doing at MacStories.
Listen to Unwind:
The bigger change is that today we’re also introducing MacStories Unwind+, an exclusive perk for Club MacStories members. Unwind+ will be released every week a day early on Thursdays, without ads, and in high bitrate audio. Both versions of the show also feature brand new artwork by our own Silvia Gatta.
With the expansion of Unwind, we’re also simplifying the Club MacStories podcast lineup, consolidating the monthly MacStories Unplugged and AV Club Town Halls into Unwind. The fun, quirky stories and explorations of the differences between Italian and American culture that Unplugged was known for will become a regular segment on Unwind.
Also, AV Club is continuing, but instead of being limited to the Club MacStories+ and Club Premier Town Hall feed, the monthly event will become an episode of Unwind for all Club members. Club MacStories+ and Club Premier members will still help pick the media for AV Club in our Discord community and have the chance to listen live during recording. We’re reorganizing and adding to the channels in the community Discord to make it easier for members to find and discuss the media they love too.
We’re excited to bring you this new edition of MacStories Unwind beginning this week. There was a lot of overlap among Unwind, Unplugged, and our AV Club podcast episodes, and by rolling all of our media picks together with the free-form, casual vibe of Unplugged, we hope you join us for what we think will be the best version of Unwind yet.
If you already listen to Unwind, there’s nothing you need to do to enjoy the new format because the podcast feed isn’t changing. The same goes for Club members who were subscribed to MacStories Unplugged. Unwind+ will replace Unplugged in that feed, so the next time you download an episode, you’ll see Unwind instead.
If you’re not listening to Unwind, we’d love it if you’d give it a try. You’ll find great recommendations for TV shows, movies, videogames, and music, along with the occasional book, podcast, and even media-related hardware. Plus, if you’ve never listened to Unplugged, you’re in for a treat with stories about things like acid-spewing vultures, retirees spectating at construction sites, and southern cooking. Yes, it’s a little weird, but it’s fun too.
Listen to Unwind:
If you want to level up your Unwind experience, we’d love it if you’d consider a Club MacStories membership. We offer three tiers of membership with perks like our active Discord community, exclusive discounts, special columns, and now, Unwind+. And, with Club Premier, you also get AppStories+, the extended, ad-free version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered a day early most weeks in high-bitrate audio. You can learn more about our Club plans using the buttons below.
Join Club Premier here:
To compare every Club MacStories plan we offer, visit our Club plans page.
So, starting today, all members of Club MacStories will have access to MacStories Unwind+ weekly. And, to participate in deciding what we cover for on the monthly AV Club episodes and the live recordings of those episodes, join Club MacStories+ or Club Premier, which each come with a long list of other perks. We hope you enjoy the new format.
The support of Club members is the foundation of MacStories’ future, which is why we’re actively working on growing membership. The Club will celebrate its eighth anniversary this year, and by growing it deliberately each year since 2015, we’ve maintained the free ad-supported stories and podcasts we offer while giving readers and listeners an option that isn’t just ad-free but extends what we’re able to offer across every facet of MacStories.
We’ve got many plans for MacStories that have been in the works for a long time now, which we expect to be able to start sharing soon. We’re excited to share it all with you and would love it if you’d join the Club to help us make those plans a reality.